Polanski didn’t know Towne, but he came with Evans and Nicholson’s imprimatur. Evans even offered to find Polanski a secluded house in the Hills, high up, away from gawkers and paparazzi, and big enough for the all-in parties Roman loved, with a pool and a view. And he wasn’t kidding about Passover.
Of course the script that had been sent to him was a mess, but Polanski decided he would go to Los Angeles to meet about Chinatown.
“It was a bunch of friends,” he said.
* * *
To get things going, Polanski, Evans, and Sylbert met Towne for lunch at Nate ’n Al’s. Despite the comfortable deli setting, all were amiably agitated; exercising Towne’s (expensive) right on the option, Evans had purchased a script that irritated everyone, and with the pleasantries behind them, the time had come to level with Towne: there was more work to do—a lot more.
Further, Polanski had found Los Angeles to be the heartbreak town he feared (“Every road I drove on brought the tragedy back to me”), and wanted nothing more than to offer his notes quickly and board the next plane back to Europe. Evans, foreseeing the showdown between writer and director, was on guard to keep both playing fair, though his allegiance was to Polanski; Sylbert, whose story sense was as valued as his art direction, was likewise inclined toward his friend, the director; Towne, the one who hadn’t made Rosemary’s Baby, was on defense, alone.
It would be a long lunch.
Where to begin?
Polanski. He assured Towne that he respected him too much to sugarcoat it. Though he appreciated that Towne had already gone to considerable lengths to narrow down the script from the hundreds of pages of the Catalina draft, it was still far too long at 180 pages. Evans and Sylbert agreed. The story was a bafflement of subplots; again Evans and Sylbert agreed (and, by the way, so did Nicholson, Evans explained to Towne). Gittes, Polanski felt, was lost in a horde of well-developed but auxiliary characters; again Evans and Sylbert agreed. And the title? Save for Gittes’s backstory, the script had nothing to do with Chinatown or anything remotely Chinese. It didn’t even have a single scene set in Chinatown. That wouldn’t fly. Nor would all the civics. Polanski loved the scenes about the water scandal, but “in reality,” he said, “the capitalist swindle with the water and land of Los Angeles doesn’t bother anyone,” and in their current form, he feared they would overwhelm the incest story, which, to Polanski, was Chinatown’s emotional core. And the ending? Evelyn kills her father? Be reasonable, Polanski advised. Why doesn’t Cross “get away clean,” Roman asked, “just like most bad guys really do”?
He was too tactful to say as much, but Towne felt even then that Polanski’s objection referred to a tragic past that was more real to him than the script. “I don’t mean this unkindly,” he reflected, “but I think it was impossible for Roman to come back to Los Angeles and not end his movie with an attractive blond lady being murdered.” Alongside the question of the ending, there hovered a larger concern: Had grief clarified or clouded Polanski’s instincts?
Dutifully Towne considered Polanski’s approach to the ending at face value, but explained that he was after something, he hoped, more complicated than desolate. Gittes tries, and, yes, fails to stop Evelyn from killing her father and ruining her life, “but he did succeed,” Towne would say, “in getting her daughter out of the country. So the ending was bittersweet in that one person at least—the child—wasn’t tainted.”
“I felt this was too romantic,” Polanski said. “Too much of a happy ending.”
Towne looked to Evans and Sylbert for support. But they stood with Polanski. “We were really very critical to such a degree,” Polanski recalled, “that Bob Towne was quite depressed.” He regarded the draft in hand as the greatest thing he had yet written.
Reluctantly the screenwriter agreed to a massive revision, and the meeting adjourned.
Polanski, as soon as he could, flew back to Rome.
Towne, who had already spent more than two years on the draft, to say nothing of the many thousands of dollars borrowed and spent, who had willingly sold off his right to direct and his artistic control, was shattered. Shorter? It was already shorter. When would it be enough? When would it stop being his?
Had it already?
Forget it.
Leaving Nate ’n Al’s, Towne couldn’t even claim the righteous honor of being wronged. No one had forced him to be a screenwriter.
* * *
By the time Polanski was summoned back to Los Angeles, in the summer of 1973, Towne’s screenplay had gotten shorter, but was even more unsatisfying to Polanski than the earlier draft. Polanski was baffled, both by the story, a drama still too diffuse to captivate, and by a screenwriter who appeared, three years after embarking on his project, still at a loss to contain his own creation. If the latest draft had improved on the first, Polanski would have come back to town—this time to Dick Sylbert’s Chinese deco place at the Lotus Apartments in West Hollywood—heartened by progress, but what with the antagonistic creative slog he saw ahead, his anguished Los Angeles, and the gloom of the Lotus’s creaking floorboards and tiny rooms—more like an abandoned opium den than a Californian hideaway—his depression, held off for so long by avoidance and adventure, recurred and deepened.
And it wasn’t all in Polanski’s head; the city itself was undone by mourning. “It changed apparently beyond recognition,” he observed. Since the murders the communal dream of social and political reformation that had illumed the sixties had blackened, almost on cue, at the decade’s turn. The flower children, no longer children, no longer lined the Whisky a Go Go in their rainbow beads and tie-dye. They no longer fought proudly and smiled sunward; now, like Jack Nicholson, they raged and grinned and, come midnight, hid their eyes behind dark shades. In the morning, partied-out lapsed hippies woke up slumped against the Whisky wall in their ice-cold sequins and disco glitter, the nihilistic badges of Fuck-It-All America. What did the Bee Gees stand for? It didn’t matter. Richard Nixon was president. “Sharon’s murder and the landing on the moon changed everything,” Polanski said. “When man walked on the moon, some romantic idea of the moon was over. I believed in romance when I was with Sharon. It was happening! I mean, why it cannot be? But the magic illusion of romance was gone.” Memory was a despot that lived in his house and banged his pots and pans. It followed him to bed and sat on his head and shouted if he slept. It locked the door and cuffed his wrists and watched him try to run.
Polanski discerned the change in Los Angeles, “from really bucolic suburbs with quiet streets and houses left virtually opened, to an area of very dangerous living with people barricading themselves. Vengeance in all aspects. Not only crime on the streets but drugs and envy inside.” The cause and effect of Sharon’s murder was, to him, “the most dramatic change in the history of America,” entwined as it was in Vietnam, its epidemic swirl of futility and rage. “The hippie movement has degenerated,” he reflected, “but the degeneration came from the top, not from the bottom. When the kids began preaching new values, the Government tried to beat their ideas out of them. The reaction, from Berkeley on, was only what you could expect: violence.” A civil war had been lost.